8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. OK For more details of these
cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy
[http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/terms/privacy/websites/cookies/].

Discovering Literature: Shakespeare &

Renaissance

John Donne and metaphysical poetry

Article created by: Michael Donkor
Themes: Language, word play and text [/shakespeare/themes/language-word-play-and-text]
, Renaissance writers [/shakespeare/themes/renaissance-writers] , Poetry
[/shakespeare/themes/poetry]
Published: 31 Mar 2017
Michael Donkor explains what makes John Donne a metaphysical poet, and
looks at the creative and distinctive ways in which Donne used metaphysical
techniques.
When we begin exploring John Donne [/people/john-donne] ’s verse [/works/poems-by-john-
donne] , the description of him as a ‘metaphysical’ poet is inescapable and so it’s worth
considering in detail.

Importantly, Donne and the other 16th- and 17th-century poets gathered under the
‘metaphysical’ banner – Carew, Vaughan and Marvell [https://www.bl.uk/people/andrew-
marvell] to name some of the most renowned – didn’t form a cohesive movement in their
own time. However, their stylistic similarities – in particular a kind of showy originality and
linguistic immediacy – have meant that they have been clustered together for centuries.
Some critics such as the 18th-century essayist Samuel Johnson
[https://www.bl.uk/people/samuel-johnson] have criticised metaphysical poets for what they
saw as their self-conscious cleverness. Others such as the poet T S Eliot
[https://www.bl.uk/people/t-s-eliot] have celebrated their inventiveness.

Although it’s important not to lose sight of the differences between these writers, Donne
does make use of many typical ‘metaphysical’ features used by others in the group –
arresting turns of phrase, conciseness, conceits and an emphasis on the argumentative, for
example. We might then, reasonably enough, say that the metaphysical label ‘fits’ his work
and leave it there. What warrants further exploration is establishing how – exactly,
specifically – Donne makes brilliant and unique use of these techniques.

Arresting language: Questions and imperatives

Questions

Metaphysical poetry is often characterised by the freshness and energy of its narrative
voices. Questions – or interrogatives – are devices that Donne powerfully uses to achieve
these qualities.

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 1/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

‘The Good Morrow’ demonstrates the richness of questioning in Donne’s work. Here we
open in the middle of the action, or in medias res, given immediate access to wandering
‘pillow talk’ between partners. The speaker boldly asks:

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved. Were we not wean'd till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the ’seven sleepers' den?

The accumulative nature of the questions here enacts the whirring of an imagination made
‘childishly’ excited by the power of love. Along with the listing, the enjambment of the first
line and caesura in the second work together to emphasise the persona’s incredulity at his
good fortune: these structural strategies replicate a kind of stuttering in disbelief. Perhaps
more than this, these opening phrases trace a dawning realisation about a wasted, worthless
past and a transformed present and future. Rather than signalling uncertainty as we might
expect interrogatives to do, these phrases are more like assertions. They mark an epiphany,
the speaker’s sudden awareness of his and his lover’s changed state.

First edition of John Donne's Poems, 1633

‘The Good Morrow’ was first printed, two years after Donne’s death, in this 1633 edition.

Usage terms Public Domain [http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0]

A striking barrage of interrogatives also features in 'Woman’s Constancy'. Here, the act of
asking serves a very different purpose. In this poem, our narrator is desperate to know:

Now thou hast loved me one whole day,

Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow?
Or say that now
We are not just those persons which we were?
Or, that oaths made in reverential fear
Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear?

As in 'Break of Day' where the speaker cheekily demands ‘Why should we rise because ’tis
light?/ Did we lie down because ’twas night?’ the start of 'Woman’s Constancy' is playful:
these questions are teasing challenges, an arch performance of inferiority designed to draw

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 2/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

out assured affirmations of feeling from the beloved. They give the text a kind of circularity,
as the playfulness of these opening questions matches the text’s conclusion, where the
speaker’s previous worries about his lady’s intentions are coolly seen off with the pithy line
‘For by tomorrow, I may think so too’.

Alternatively, this rapid firing of questions here can be read as combative, as the speaker
aggressively silences potential interruptions from his companion. This is a silencing of the
female speaker we often encounter in Donne’s work, an aspect of the texts which
contemporary readers often find difficult.

First edition of John Donne's Poems, 1633

‘Woman’s Constancy’ opens with a barrage of playful, teasing questions.

Usage terms Public Domain [http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0]

This more antagonistic function of enquiry chimes with questioning in 'The Canonization'.

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

These questions loudly defend the lovers’ rights against powerful external pressures.
Interestingly, the speaker’s images here nod towards ideas of voyaging and territorial
enlargement. Such motifs of mapping recur throughout Donne’s poetry and reflect the
metaphysical interest in the geographical advances and discoveries of the day. In the
poem’s questions here, the speaker inverts the associations of these map-making symbols.
Rather than being used to express exploratory desires, the persona seeks to preserve some
small, enclosed ‘ground’ on which he and his mistress can love untroubled by the prying –
and questioning? – of an unfeeling world.

The Mariner's Mirrour, 1588

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 3/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

This is an English version of the world’s first sea-atlas, translated by Anthony Ashley. The
hand-coloured title page is filled with map-making instruments, and a blank globe waiting to
be filled in.

Usage terms Public Domain [http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0]

Imperatives

The poem’s imperatives possess the same force, vigour and intent:

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the King's real, or his stamped face
Contemplate, what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

These pointed, cocksure demands undermine the interference of a ‘busy bodying’ individual
who disturbs the union between the lover and his partner. Reflecting the more rebellious vein
of some metaphysical poetry, imperatives here serve to reduce the ambitions of a grasping
‘jobsworth’ who Donne characterises as engaging in boring, day-to-day activities much less
significant than the sacred business of loving.

Commands are used similarly in 'The Sun Rising' too:

... go chide
Late schoolboys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;

The sun is made to limit his controlling to assigned public spheres. Imperatives are
correctives, reminding ‘the sun’ that the intimate space of the bedroom is not ‘his’ rightful
domain.

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 4/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

Showing the versatility of Donne’s craftsmanship, the fantastically brutal roar that
is 'Twicknam Garden' reverberates with commands that operate very differently:

Love, let me
Some senseless piece of this place be;
Make me a mandrake, so I may grow here,
Or a stone fountain weeping out my year.

Orders enable the speaker to vengefully ‘boss around’ the feeling of ‘love’ that has
mistreated him so badly. But rather than straightforward utterances of self-aggrandisement,
these bullying remarks also have a distinct aftertaste of self-loathing, a trait we often find in
the Holy Sonnets – ‘Batter My Heart’ especially. These imperatives are not wholly
authoritative. They are, in fact, a reflection of the speaker’s weakened power, and his morbid
wish to deaden and disempower himself even further.

Startling simplicity
Another element of metaphysical poetry – perhaps related to these arresting sentence types
and one that features prominently across Donne’s love poetry – is flashes of startling
simplicity. Though thematic and ideological complexity is characteristic of the work, Donne’s
personae sometimes reject the more flowery phrasing favoured by their Elizabethan
predecessors in favour of a plainer style. Couplets in 'The Anniversary' attest to this. A year
after first meeting his mistress, the speaker assesses their relationship and believes:

All other things to their destruction draw,

Only our love hath no decay;

The largely monosyllabic diction, the generalising approach evident in the opening term ‘all’
and the metrical neatness combine to create a clear statement about the endurance of love;
one that requires little linguistic ornamentation. The phrase’s minimalism makes it irrefutably
conclusive, like some of the constructions in 'The Sun Rising':

She's all states, and all princes I,

Nothing else is.

The unfussy quality of the writing gives a conversational directness – the feeling of a voice
emboldened by love to speak confidently and clearly – and results in lines that are
immensely quotable.

Again demonstrating the variety within the body of work, Donne’s conciseness can
sometimes be much more subversive and mean-spirited.

When by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead,

And that thou think'st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
… What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee;

The spurned suitor in 'The Apparition' only ‘speaks’ for 17 short lines, but what he succinctly
says has piquancy and punch. Here, brevity perhaps reflects the idea that the speaker is so
disgusted by the infidelity of his former beloved that he feels she is unworthy of a full
explanation from him.

Works by John Donne and Ben Jonson in the

Newcastle Manuscript

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 5/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

‘The Apparition’ is included in this beautiful hand-written anthology made for Sir William
Cavendish, the first Duke of Newcastle.

Usage terms The British Library has decided to make the images of pre-1800 collection
items available on this website. For more information please refer to the following guidance
[/learning/access-and-reuse-guidance-notes] .

Conceits
Inventive metaphors – or conceits – and comparisons are perhaps the most widely known
hallmark of metaphysical work. In his commentary on this poetry, the 18th-century critic and
essayist Samuel Johnson was disturbed by the potential for conceits to ‘violent[ly]’ bring
together ‘heterogeneous ideas’. Another, more positive response to these dazzlingly original
images is that they make readers revisit well-worn ideas with fresh eyes.

A useful reference point here is 'The Bait', Donne’s buoyant reply to Sir Walter Raleigh’s
pastoral poem, 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love'. 'The Bait' uses a series of images
from the world of fishing to explore the predatory nature of many romantic encounters. Using
these images, the speaker characterises his beloved as irresistibly alluring, a woman who
possesses temptations much more subtle than the fisherman’s crude forms of entrapment:
‘angling reeds, …strangling snare, or windowy net … sleave-silk flies’. All beings –
particularly the speaker – are hopelessly drawn towards the luminous beloved, all
‘amorously [to her] swim’, perhaps in spite of their ‘wiser’ instincts.

This extended metaphor does more than flatter and praise. It is also a comment on the
poet’s words themselves. In the same way that the speaker describes how ‘poor fish’ are
inexorably pulled to the beloved, the text is also an attempt to entice the addressee to ‘live
with [him] and be [his] love’. The poem is, in itself, a kind of ‘bait’, a collection of ‘silken lines,
and silver hooks’ designed to reel in the addressee.

'The Flea' uses a conceit as a means of flirtation – and sexual coercion – too.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deny’st me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 6/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

The flea metaphor represents denied sensual pleasure; its tiny scale reflects the
insignificance of the woman’s chastity. Its body – containing the blood of speaker and
mistress – symbolises the union between the couple. Here is part of the magic of metaphors
and one of the reasons they perhaps appealed to the intellectually curious metaphysical
poets: metaphors enable readers to see how one image can be stretched to accommodate a
range of meanings and associations. They show the thrilling possibilities of language put to
poetic use.

Micrographia by Robert Hooke, 1665

This astonishingly detailed illustration of a flea fills a huge fold-out page, 43x33cm. It is part
of Robert Hooke’s book of objects seen through a microscope, published 34 years after
Donne’s death.

Usage terms Public Domain [http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0]

But, almost embodying the feelings of those bored and – perhaps more aptly – those ‘turned
off’ by the speaker’s extended metaphor, towards the end of the text Donne’s mistress
becomes a ‘cruel and sudden’ literary critic. She disrupts the speaker’s bombastic flow by
killing the flea that inspired him:

… hast thou since

Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?

However, the death of the flea doesn’t stop the narrator from creatively connecting the pest’s
plight with his own. He prolongs the comparison:

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou

Find’st not thy self, nor me, the weaker now;
’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

The speaker’s continued drawing of this parallel, even when it seems to have lost its
persuasive power, perhaps leads us to wonder whether he is more enamoured with the
artistry of his own conceits – and his own voice – than with the woman next to him.
https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 7/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning' is another fascinating text to consider in terms of

conceits. When reading such poetry we often expect one conceit to extend over the course
of a poem. This was an aspect of Donne’s verse that Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[https://www.bl.uk/people/samuel-taylor-coleridge] found especially stimulating. However, 'A
Valediction' works differently. The poem’s speaker offers his companion consolation as the
two embark on a long period of separation. In order to do this, he calls on a whole host of
metaphors and images – the weather, natural disasters, astrological happenings, metallurgy
– to describe the durability of their love. There is great compassion in this act: movingly, the
speaker is determined to experiment with a whole range of comparisons to find the best one
to soothe his partner’s anxieties.

Poems by Shakespeare, Donne and others in

Margaret Bellasys's commonplace book, c. 1630

In the 17th century, many readers made collections of their favourite quotes and verses. This
one includes Donne’s poem, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, but with the title
‘Compasse’.

Usage terms The British Library has decided to make the images of pre-1800 collection
items available on this website. For more information please refer to the following guidance
[/learning/access-and-reuse-guidance-notes] .

In the final three quatrains the speaker alights on his most touching and effective analogy:

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th' other foot, obliquely run.
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 8/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

With great elegance, an ordinary mathematical compass is refashioned in Donne’s hands. It

becomes a poignant reflection of romantic togetherness and individuality; a beautiful
meditation on the reciprocity, balance and sturdiness that we often find underpinning the
healthiest and most long lasting of relationships. Pivoting, swinging, standing firm, the
compass is here made dancerly: the reader observes it performing a seamless pas de deux,
where both partners respond to and support one another intuitively.

16th-century compasses

This ornate pair of compasses is part of a set made by Bartholomew Newsum (c. 1530–
1587), the clockmaker to Elizabeth I.

Usage terms British Museum Standard Terms of Use

[http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_this_site/terms_of_use.aspx]

Argumentation
Another distinctly metaphysical aspect of Donne’s writing is the explicit highlighting of the
poetry’s rhetorical nature. This interest is also in keeping with the Renaissance appetite for
Classical oration [http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-arts-of-logic-and-rhetoric-by-dudley-
fenner]. 'A Fever' evidences this quality clearly. While the speaker observes his beloved
physically struggling with illness, he undergoes mental suffering. He rails passionately:

But yet thou canst not die, I know;

To leave this world behind, is death,
But when thou from this world wilt go,
The whole world vapours with thy breath.

Or if, when thou, the world’s soul, goest,

It stay, ’tis but thy carcass then,
The fairest woman, but thy ghost,
But corrupt worms, the worthiest men.

As well as revealing heightened, frenzied feeling, these dramatic declarations also

demonstrate an emotionally charged mind still able to construct logical, orderly argument.
Each of the persona’s ideas occupies its own, designated stanza. Careful endstopping – the
punctuation at the end of each line – steadies the pace. Coordinating conjunctions such as
‘but’ and ‘or’ both demonstrate the agility of the persona’s thinking and give linearity to the
developing debate. Such features also show a concern with exploring cognition and the
ways in which we form and organise our thoughts. This has led to some lively comparisons
https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 9/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

between this aspect of the poetry and the ‘stream of consciousness

[https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/notebook-drafts-of-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-volume-i]’
style adopted by many modernist writers [https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-
literature/articles/modernism-time-and-consciousness-the-influence-of-henri-bergson-and-
marcel-proust].

This emphasis on debate and intellectual enquiry returns us to the classification of Donne’s
writing as ‘metaphysical’. Such a classification draws attention to the ‘philosophical’ leanings
of Donne’s work. It also usefully makes reference to the way in which Donne’s poems are
often ‘philosophical’ investigations that probe puzzling abstractions. Some might find these
complex musings of Donne’s speakers bloodless. However, it might be more rewarding to
see them as concerted attempts by impassioned speakers to better understand the wonder
of huge ideas – God, mortality, love. Thinking is, for these personae, an act of reverence
towards these ideas. It provides potentially nebulous concepts with the substance they
deserve, given that they mean so much more than some ‘lovely glorious nothing’.

Written by Michael Donkor [/shakespeare/articles?authors_sorted=Donkor*Michael]

Michael Donkor is a writer and is currently working on his first novel Hold. He also teaches
English Literature at St Paul's Girls' School in London.

The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/]

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 10/11
8/25/2018 John Donne and metaphysical poetry - The British Library

Shakespeare
People
Works
Themes
Articles
Collection items
Teaching resources
About the project
Supported since inception by

Desktop site
Mobile site
Terms of Use
About the British Library
Privacy
Cookies
Accessibility
Contact Us
All text is British Library and is available under Creative Commons Attribution Licence
[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/] except where otherwise stated

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry 11/11